Are the AIs conscious?
Are the AIs conscious? by Tyler Cowen June 10, 2026 at 1:44 pm in Philosophy Web/Tech That is the topic of my latest Free Press column. I will spare you the discussion of the AIs, but here is what I have to say about the humans: I am here to tell you that there is no ghost in the machine. But perhaps more importantly, there is barely a “ghost” in your own human machine.
- ▪Are the AIs conscious? by Tyler Cowen June 10, 2026 at 1:44 pm in Philosophy Web/Tech That is the topic of my latest Free Press column.
- ▪I will spare you the discussion of the AIs, but here is what I have to say about the humans: I am here to tell you that there is no ghost in the machine.
- ▪But perhaps more importantly, there is barely a “ghost” in your own human machine.
Marginal Revolution files mainly under finance. We currently carry 103 of its stories.
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Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Marginal Revolution |
| Canonical URL | https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/06/are-the-ais-conscious.html?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=are-the-ais-conscious |
| Publication time | Wed, 10 Jun 2026 17:44:35 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-06-10T17:49:05.665Z |
| Last seen | 2026-06-10T17:49:05.665Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | None |
| Cluster logic | Not yet clustered, or no peer story found in the clustering window. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Are the AIs conscious? by Tyler Cowen June 10, 2026 at 1:44 pm in Philosophy Web/Tech That is the topic of my latest Free Press column. I will spare you the discussion of the AIs, but here is what I have to say about the humans: I am here to tell you that there is no ghost in the machine. But perhaps more importantly, there is barely a “ghost” in your own human machine. “Are people conscious?” is a better and more scientifically plausible question than whether AIs are conscious. If there is one near-universal tendency of humans, it is to attribute intent where none is present. Prehistoric humans anthropomorphized nature and attributed natural events to good and bad deities.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Marginal Revolution.
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